"That's how I want you to remember me... ms... when I'm not here," Garth whispered roughly to her as he kissed her damp eyelids and then her mouth.

"That's how I'm going to make love to you the night we conceive our child."

They had already talked about the family they planned to have, not for a while yet, but neither of them wanted to wait too long. Claudia wanted four children, two boys and two girls, but Garth had demurred that maybe they should stop at two.

"Four will be expensive to educate, especially if I stay on in the army," he had warned her.

That was another subject they had discussed at great length. Claudia was well aware of what it meant to be an army wife, and the last thing she would ever do would be to want to come between Garth and a career he loved, but Garth himself, as she knew, was now having second thoughts about his own commitment to the army.

"I wish you weren't going back tomorrow," Claudia repeated drowsily to him as she started to slide towards sleep.

Garth groaned.

"So do I. Oh, God, Clo, but that was good ... you were good...."

Slowly and lovingly, he ran his hands over her orgasm-relaxed body. He didn't consider himself to be a man who was in any way oversexed and he hoped he wasn't a selfish lover, but he was, he acknowledged, quite highly sexed and Claudia aroused him as no other woman had ever done or would ever do. If they woke up early enough in the morning, he would be able to make love to her again before he had to leave. As he eased her body down against his own, he wondered how she would react if he asked her to forgo wearing any underwear the next time he came home. Just Clo. -show me how much you want me. Yes, that's it," he told her thickly as she moved on top of him, lifting her hips, then lifting herself as she slowly and uncertainly at first started to ride him.

The look on his face told her all she needed to know, giving her the courage and encouragement to take control of her own sexuality and of him. She heard him groan as she deliberately compressed her muscles and held him still.

Hungrily, he reached for her breasts. Claudia leaned forward, moving oh so slowly and deliberately up and down the thick, hot moistness of his shaft, slowly at first then faster while Garth groaned and kneaded her breast and then reached down between her legs to tug on her now erotically engorged clitoris.

The combined sensation of Garth touching her while his penis filled her was almost too much for Claudia to bear. She was aware of a sensation of hurtling towards a barrier and knew that once through it she would have absolutely no control. Everything was rushing over her too fast for her to stop and she heard herself cry out Garth's name.

Then she screamed as her body exploded in a climax so intense that she was still shuddering with the aftershock of it minutes later when she lay wrapped in Garth's arms, the tears of release lying damply on his chest.

"That's how I want you to remember me... ms... when I'm not here," Garth whispered roughly to her as he kissed her damp eyelids and then her mouth.

"That's how I'm going to make love to you the night we conceive our child."

They had already talked about the family they planned to have, not for a while yet, but neither of them wanted to wait too long. Claudia wanted four children, two boys and two girls, but Garth had demurred that maybe they should stop at two.

Tour will be expensive to educate, especially if I stay on in the army," he had warned her.

That was another subject they had discussed at great length. Claudia was well aware of what it meant to be an army wife, and the last thing she would ever do would be to want to come between Garth and a career he loved, but Garth himself, as she knew, was now having second thoughts about his own commitment to the army.

"I wish you weren't going back tomorrow," Claudia repeated drowsily to him as she started to slide towards sleep.

Garth groaned.

"So do I. Oh, God, Clo, but that was good ... you were good...."

Slowly and lovingly, he ran his hands over her orgasm-relaxed body. He didn't consider himself to be a man who was in any way oversexed and he hoped he wasn't a selfish lover, but he was, he acknowledged, quite highly sexed and Claudia aroused him as no other woman had ever done or would ever do. If they woke up early enough in the morning, he would be able to make love to her again before he had to leave. As he eased her body down against his own, he wondered how she would react if he asked her to forgo wearing any underwear the next time he came home. Just the thought of her sweet, warm body being covered only by a dress or skirt made him start to ache and tingle.

Stop that, he warned his slowly engorging penis sternly. You're going to have to wait until morning.

Claudia listened intently as Janice Long started to outline the details of one of the cases Claudia would be working on.

"She's eighteen now," she told Claudia, watching her reaction to the identity photograph inside the file depicting a ravishingly pretty darkhaired girl.

"She's also a heroin addict," her supervisor continued grimly.

"She first came to our notice three years ago when the police picked her up for soliciting. She told us then that she was seventeen and that she'd run away from home because her stepfather was abusing her. It's a common enough story," she added when she heard Claudia's quickly indrawn breath of pity.

"Yes, I know," Claudia agreed, 'but that doesn't make it any the less appalling. "

"Mmm ... I dare say it wouldn't if it happened to be true. Katriona, though, unfortunately happens to be an extremely skilled and habitual liar. Most of these girls are. They live in a fantasy world half the time. That's part of their problem. Ours is trying to separate the fantasy from the reality."

Although she didn't say so, Claudia thought the older woman was being unduly hard. The girl was, after all, just that, and it made Claudia's compassionate heart ache for her to think of how frightened she must have been to find herself on the streets, alone and vulnerable.

As Janice Long watched her, she sighed under her breath. Here was another one, wet behind the ears and dewy-eyed, running over with the milk of human kindness for the rest of mankind. Well, she'd soon learn, just as she'd had to do herself.

The people they were dealing with might be victims and in need of their help but that didn't stop them from possessing their fair share of human vices, being manipulative and crafty, underhanded, deceitful, dishonest and sometimes downright dangerous.

Katriona, for all her stunning good looks and her comparative youth, was no angel. Unlike many others of her ilk, her drug habit had not been forced on her by a manipulative pimp intent on keeping her 'on the game' so that he could live off the money she made him. Katriona didn't have a pimp--she didn't need one as she had more than once boasted to Janice. She was the one who used men, not the other way around.

She had told Janice that she started using drugs simply because she wanted to see how it felt and she had laughed when the young trainee with Janice at the time was unable to conceal her shocked reaction at this information.

Privately, Janice suspected that Katriona paid for her addiction by selling drugs to some of the other youngsters who shared the squat with her, but neither she nor the police had ever been able to prove it.

"You can't pin anything on me," Katriona had announced smugly the last time the police had picked her up and Janice had known that she was pleased by their inability to do anything.

One thing Janice did know, or rather thought she knew, was that, despite all her denials, at some stage in her life Katriona had been abused in some way by a man, if not sexually then certainly emotionally and physically. Her hatred and bitter contempt of them were classic signs even if Katriona herself would never admit it.

The whole of her past was, in fact, shrouded in mystery, but again that was not so unusual with these youngsters. Boys as well as girls arrived in London, sleeping rough and disappearing into the teeming underworld of youthful vice and squalor until they were picked up by the police and passed on to the social services. By that time, they had generally invented a new past for themselves.

Sometimes, unfortunately all too rarely, fate was kind and a much loved youngster was reunited with his or her distraught parents, but more often than not. Janice frowned as she studied Claudia's down-bent head. They always proved to be more trouble than they were worth, these upper middle-class, overidealistic young graduates who hadn't a clue what life was really all about and who still described their parents as "Mummy' and " Daddy' while working with. Mummy and Daddy. God, Katriona would laugh in her face. Either that or scream a torrent of vile abuse at her the moment she heard Claudia's "Queen's' English accent. But it was not her job to protect the likes of the Claudias of this world from reality. No one had forced her to take the job--a job for which she was completely and culturally unfit so far as Janice was concerned.

She herself had grown up on a vast council estate in the north of England. The only reason she had ever been allowed to take up the place she had won to the local grammar school had been because the headmaster of her junior school had stepped in and persuaded her parents to allow her to go.

Even then, there had been the indignity of having to wear a second-hand uniform, of there never being enough money to pay for her school dinners--and as for any school trips. She had soon learned to adopt an attitude of indifference to shield herself from the taunts of her schoolmates. At university, when she hadn't been studying for her degree, she had been working to support herself and keeping out of the way of the bosses. Bar work during term time and the backbreaking slog of fruit picking during the summer. Those summer jobs had been the worst. You always got some man who thought you owed him a favour for letting you have the job--and the kind of favour he wanted meant lying on your back with your legs wide open for him.

Well, not Janice. She had seen too much of what that brought you.

"But who are her parents? Where has she come from?" she heard Claudiaasking her frowningly as she studied the file Janice had given her.Janice gave a small shrug."Who knows? Maybe not even her. With her looks, she could have Gypsy or Italian blood but..." Janice gave another shrug.

"But hasn't anyone ever asked her, talked to her?" Claudiaprotested.Janice raised her eyebrows."Talked to her? We're dealing with an out and out heroin addict here.

You don't talk to them... you talk at them and if you're lucky something might just about get through."

"You sound as though... as though she's someone to be written off."

"She's already written herself off," Janice told her brutally.

"She'll be dead before she's twenty- one."

"But surely something can be done," Claudia persisted, unable to conceal her shock.

"A rehab clinic... or..."

Janice shook her head.

"You'd be wasting your time and the taxpayers' money," she countered

grimly.

"She'd never agree to go into rehab and even if she did... One of the

first things you have to understand is that..." She paused and shookher head.What was the point in telling her? Let the girl find out for herself.

Young trainees. Why the hell did she always have to be landed with them?

and Betray 131 * * Determinedly, Claudia refused to allow her feelings of revulsion to show as she followed Janice up the cold, damp concrete stairwell littered with rubbish, its air heavy with the fetid stench of urine and vomit. The huge tower block, like its neighbours, was a rabbit warren of crumbling concrete, of decaying lives. Its very existence, Claudia reflected, was an indictment, a testimony, of man's inhumanity to man.

"Two more flights," Janice puffed.

"By the way, don't ever be tempted to risk the lifts in these places," she warned Claudia.

"They're notorious for breaking down one of our team forgot and ended up being trapped inside one for almost forty-eight hours."

Claudia shuddered.

"Here we are," Janice announced.

"It's this way."

Numbly, Claudia followed her supervisor as she hurried down the walkway that overlooked the dismal rectangle of land enclosed by the tower blocks. Down below them on the ground, a group of teenagers kicked aimlessly at the rubbish that had fallen from a skip, their shoulders hunched defensively, defeatedly, Claudia recognised.

"It's this one," Janice told her, stopping outside a flat that looked more like a heavily fortified prison than a home, its windows blank and barred, its original wooden door replaced by one of heavy metal.

Janice rapped briskly and then waited. Claudia could hear the sounds of bolts being withdrawn on the other side of the door and her stomach muscles started to clench. A sharp sense that she was somehow standing at the portal of a potentially fateful event suddenly swept through her, banishing logic and reason.

As a panel was pushed to one side to reveal a spy hole, Claudia fought the temptation to give in to the inner voice urging her to flee, to leave, before it was too late.

"What do you want?7 she heard a male voice demanding truculently from inside the flat.

"I want to see Katriona Spencer," Janice responded crisply.

"Well, she don't want to see you," the voice responded.

"She's busy doing a bit of business. Know what I mean?" he added with a leering laugh.

"Tell her no visit, no giro payment," Janice told him unperturbedly.

There was a few minutes' wait, then just when Claudia thought they were going to have to leave, she could hear the sound of further heavy bolts being drawn back and the door swung open.

If she had thought the stench on the stairs hardly bearable, it was nothing compared to the appalling smell from inside the flat. It made her gag and want to retch as she followed Janice inside. It was, she acknowledged, the stench of degradation and pollution, of human beings who had descended into something dark and obscene.

As Claudia followed Janice through the claustrophobic hallway and into the room that lay beyond it, a thin bearded youth, his torso bare, his jeans pulled down to reveal his flat, thin buttocks, stood up and slowly started to pull them up. Behind him on a filthy mattress a girl lay naked. Hastily, Claudia averted her eyes, but Janice far more hardily demanded, "Where's Katriona, Lucy?"

"She's upstairs," the girl responded listlessly, ignoring her nudity and her spread-legged pose as she reached across the grubby mattress for the needle that Claudia could now see glinting in the thin light coming into the room.

As she moved, Claudia could see the existing needle tracks in her arms, and her emotions switched from shocked revulsion to compassionate pity.

"Save it," Janice advised her, correctly reading her thoughts as she indicated that they were to go upstairs.

"Like Katriona, Lucy services her habit through prostitution," she informed Claudia as they walked back into the hallway.

"Unlike Katriona, though--at least as yet--Lucy has one prison sentence behind her and another all too likely."

"What for?" Claudia asked her, expecting to hear that the girl had stolen goods to pay for her habit or perhaps sold them to the other users.

Instead, to her shock, Janice told her bluntly, "She murdered her own child--oh, it's not uncommon," she warned Claudia when she saw her expression.

"It wasn't deliberate, of course. It never is. She just lost her temper with the poor little sod one night when the punters hadn't paid her enough for her fix. She lost her temper and lashed out at him when he didn't get out of the way in time. She picked him up and threw him against the wall. He was five years old and a tough little tyke but not tough enough--she broke his skull. Luckily for him he died in hospital three days later without recovering consciousness."

"Luckily!" Claudia protested, too shocked to hide her feelings.

"If he'd lived, he'd have been brain damaged and if Lucy wasn't prepared to look after him properly, to love and protect him as a healthy, undamaged child, just what chance do you think he would have had with the handicap she inflicted on him?"

Claudia made no answer. What answer was there to make?

"In here," Janice instructed as they reached the landing. She pushed open one of the bedroom doors.

After the filth and squalor of the downstairs flat, combined with the horror of the story she had just been told, the sight of the young woman seated on the bed studying her reflection in the dressing-table mirror as she slowly brushed her lustrous, long black hair was so incongruous, so normal, that Claudia could only stare at her.

Unlike the girl they had just seen below, this one was clear-eyed and intelligent-looking, her green eyes sharply intent in her small triangular face. She was very pretty, more than pretty, Claudia acknowledged, round about her own build but taller, dressed in a long-sleeved, unexpectedly clean-looking T-shirt and a pair of jeans.

"Who's this?" the girl demanded of Janice, jerking her head in Claudia's direction.

"Claudia has just joined us," Janice explained smoothly.

The other girl gave Claudia a contemptuous look.

"A trainee, eh. Jesus, just look at her," she mocked.

"I'll bet she's never even opened her legs for a man, never mind..."